![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Isn’t opera meant to aspire to a fusion of greatness of words and music, not to have one come limping behind the other in the dusk? I wonder whether this acceptance of verbal mediocrity is common. Watch Johnathan McCullough perform the aria Batter My Heart from Curtis Opera Theatres production of composer John Adamss Doctor Atomic. It’s as if the critics felt the music was all that mattered or wanted so badly to praise the opera for its “daring” and profound subject matter that they found ways to minimize the emptiness of its actual verbal content. The New Yorker mostly avoids the subject, saying “purely as an experience in sound, the Met’s Atomic was a triumph.” He must be talking about the sound, not the words, when he refers to the “skull-splitting” duet as “sumptuous.” And the sapient Clive Barnes made the contradiction most explicit when he called the opera “terrific” but admitted that the libretto was “dull.” “Terrific” and “dull.” Sorry, they don’t go together. The New York Times critic strenuously praised just about everything in the opera while artfully avoiding any explicit reference to the words. In New York magazine we are told the libretto mixes “leaden lingo” and “opaque poetry,” but somehow that doesn’t matter because the music and sets are so good. ![]()
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